(Content: colonialism, ableism, misogyny, racism, dehumanization of non-parents. Fun content: hot tree sex, matriarchy, Rainbow Army.)
Speaker for the Dead: p. 312--331
Chapter Seventeen: The Wives
We start with an email from the chairman of the Xenological Oversight Committee, Gobawa Ekimbo, to the director of the Congressional Security Agency, which begins:
Find out how word got out that the Evacuation Fleet is armed with the Little Doctor. That is HIGHEST PRIORITY. Then find out who this so-called Demosthenes is.Yup. The fleet that is supposed to show up at Lusitania in twenty-two years and remove the colony is armed with planet-busters. This raises a lot of questions, the first batch of which are from the realm of 'hey, remember those three millennia we skipped'?
- In three thousand years, no one has learned how to defend against Doctor Device?
- In three thousand years, no one has put legal restrictions in place so that Doctor Device has to be, like, authorised by a unanimous public vote of Starways Congress before it can be pulled out of the dusty vault where it is presumably stored?
- In three thousand years, no one has thought of a weapon/defence that might be more useful in maintaining a 'peaceful' planetary blockade than the World Eater? They haven't got satellite networks that could electromagnetically stun any ships that tried to take off, or interdictor fields that prevent Park shifts? People remember that getting into space is super hard, right? Preventing someone from getting into space is possibly the easiest task that anyone can perform.*
Because nothing else important has happened for three thousand years, the chairman (whom I guess is also the star-emperor or what have you) makes reference to having "a hundred times the responsibility of Peter the Hegemon and about a tenth of his power", and demands to know why Lusitania would rebel over two scientists. (He can be forgiven for forgetting how important the xenologers are to the colonists, since the colonists themselves also keep forgetting that vitally important people exist, but it should be howlingly obvious why people would object to getting completely uprooted and/or blasted into component atoms by the evacuation committee.)
Gobawa's a caricature of the pragmatically-heartless politician, so he says "When it comes to war, human is human and alien is alien. All that ramen business goes up in smoke when we're talking about survival." The Little Ones are, of course, the first real opportunity anyone's had to put Valentine's terminology into practical use, so I guess one point for realism that no one really cares about it; the weird thing continues to be that people are even talking about the Hierarchy of Exclusion while simultaneously taking so little interest in the Little Ones themselves for decades.
Back in the forest, Human leads them through the trees and leaps around drumming on trunks, and there's more dialogue-that-doesn't-actually-communicate-anything about the third life, which has something to do with Pipo and Libo's murders. To be clear, last chapter they explained that Miro wouldn't 'sprout' if planted, and a couple of chapters before that the Little Ones were given reason to believe that Pipo and Libo had really not wanted to be eviscerated, and still when Ender asks "What is the third life?" he gets a non-answer ("The gift that Pipo kept for himself") that assumes he knows exactly what Mandachuva means ('that thing where we murder you and you turn into a tree') but somehow hasn't caught onto what it's called.
Ouanda is still boggling at the way Ender asks direct questions, because utterly transforming the Little Ones' civilisation with foreign technology is one thing but asking them to define terms (after teaching them two entire human languages and the meanings thereof) is outrageous. Ela, who currently bears all of my hopes for real science, is wandering among the trees and actually noticing that there are as few plant species as there are animals--one tree, one vine, one kind of undergrowth.
They arrive at a clearing with a single massive tree that they think at first is crawling with worms, but they are corrected: it's the three hundred twenty "little brothers". (At this point, my confusion of last episode has to be considered resolved, I guess--all 320 new births in the last four years are still in larval form, which means Arrow and Cups are from a previous generation, but they only received their names within the last couple of years.)
And now it's time for the kind of sexism which is practically unavoidable when you deal with societies that have incredibly strict gender roles compounded with actual physical dimorphism, and yet still manages to find new heights of gratuity through the kind of lofty analysis of cross-gender interaction usually associated with TV shows with laugh-tracks.
A wife appears, much bigger than any male they've seen--females don't reveal their names to males, but Human confides that they call her Shouter amongst themselves. She speaks the Wives' Language so beautifully that it sounds like singing, so obviously this can't be a pile of sexist rubbish. She agrees to meet with Ender, and to let Ela and Ouanda come with him (being ladies and thus approved), and to allow him any translator he wants as long as it's Human.
Ender sees more female Little Ones watching him from the various houses as he approaches, and asks how many there are, but only when Shouter--fuck it, her name is Star-looker; we won't find that out for a few more chapters but I'm not using a stupid nickname just because Card thinks he's clever. Star-looker says that among the wives, the males do not speak unless spoken to, and Ender just nods, pivots, and marches away. Human protests, but Ender states that he will deal as equals or not at all, and it may be an honor to be among the wives but it's also an honor to have a Speaker for the Dead in their presence as well. So. Yeah. Ender, whom careful readers will recall is axiomatically right about everything moral, sees no value in respecting the cultures of other species; he rejects their value system and substitutes his own, which is how we know that he's enlightened.
Human says that he can't relay Ender's words, and Ouanda contributes by realising that he means it's literally impossible to say 'this male demands not to be commanded by females' in Wives' Language, so Ender asks that they conduct their discussions in Males' Language.
Kind of funny that Ender's approach, which he describes as egalitarian, involves everyone doing everything he says and zero concessions on his part. (This is like a case study of why people who identify as 'equalist' instead of 'feminist' or 'anti-racist' are not to be trusted.) There's much cacophony among the wives and Ouanda critiques his anthropological practice (the only rule he hasn't broken so far is 'don't kill anyone', ha ha inside-joke foreshadowing spoilers he's going to kill someone later and it'll be the Right Thing to do), but Ender says he's there as an ambassador and thus anthropological rules don't apply. Tragically, he seems unaware of any diplomatic rules to replace them. Ender thinks it'll all work out:
At bloody last, Ender is invited to come back, "as a sister to a brother", and Star-looker speaks in Males' Language in the holy birthing place, which Arrow declares makes this a "very great day", because apparently he has also personally ditched the idea that he will not speak unless spoken to by a wife. Star-look is still half a metre shorter than Ender, which I'm a little sad about, because I was enjoying imagining her massive, like an eight-foot-tall bear. There's more back and forth, which is mostly about how awesome Ender is, asking Human to speak as directly as possible and put the blame on him, the "rude framling", and asking not to be described as 'holy'.
There's a bunch of drawn out exposition and "I can't say that in any language" and so I will sum up: they learn that Little One mothers don't grow to adulthood, but give birth while still quite small and their bodies are eaten by their newborns. The mothertree cracks open so they can see the even-tinier Little Ones inside (in the meantime, Jane works out that the trees 'speak' by reshaping their wood to modulate the echoes of existing soundwaves, which is why the Father Tongue involves drumming on trunks with sticks). The wives were sterile or never fertilised (which involves carrying them from the mothertree out to crawl around and pick up pollen from the father trees in the forest, like Rooter, which is the real reason the males have their nipply bits--they're for young mothers to cling to during the journey).
Ouanda and Ela immediately begin wondering what could be done to allow the mothers to survive (caesarean sections and the introduction of high-protein foods to the inside of the mothertree) but of course Ender shuts them down--"How dare you!"--saying that in a few centuries if the Little Ones want to do that for themselves they can (I guess points for non-colonialist principles, but revoked for insisting it can only happen in the distant future), and then this hurricane of wrong:
This, of course, is the natural conclusion of Card's genetic-continuity fetish: if you can't/don't/won't have kids, you're literally useless and dangerous and we might as well mulch you into baby formula. He says this, out loud, in the middle of the Wives' village, populated by the most revered of the Little Ones, the leaders of their society: women who didn't give birth. The cognitive dissonance is amazing, the offence is spectacular (lucky for him Human isn't doing a live translation or the wives would have just have all heard him say that he thinks they're pointless), and come to think of it, it raises a big question which the book will never address: do the wives grow into trees when they die? If so, it's a bit biologically weird that they aren't able to fertilise mothers themselves in that form; here in the real world, most trees have both 'male' and 'female' components and I'm pretty sure no trees have completely non-fertile forms, so why did the trees of Lusitanian spontaneously develop infertile forms just because they merged with a strictly dimorphic animal? The kind of Salvador-Dali-inspired evolution that had to lead to plant-animal-life-stage-hybrids was obviously focused on maintaining reproduction above all else, but either the wives' trees have no genetic contribution or the male Little Ones are the only ones who actually merged with the trees and the females are still meat-creatures from start to finish. (I mean, in a better book, there would be actual parallels drawn to the COTMOCs and the ability of infertile people to tremendously contribute to society, the idea that people have value apart from being a link to future generations, but Ender's just completely shut that whole line of thought down.)
It turns out that Human did translate a little of this exchange, but he made sure to keep his propaganda as pro-Ender as possible: he said that Ouanda wanted to make the Little Ones be more like humans and Ender said this could never happen or he'd have to put the fence back up.
If anyone's keeping score at home:
They begin negotiations with a traditional threat from Star-looker, demanding everything humans have to offer or she'll send the males to murder the colony in their sleep. Human explains that this is traditional Little One boilerplate for negotiations, but Ender demands that she withdraw the threat or he'll give her nothing. (Remember, respect the Little Ones and the ways they do things different from you, except when you find it personally offensive.) Star-looker gets up, rants to the heavens a bit about how rude Ender is, then sits down again:
I've studied a half-dozen kinds of martial arts, most of which had some form of sparring. When you spar, you bow to your opponent, and you keep your eyes on them. Not because you don't trust them, but because it symbolises your respect, your acknowledgement that if you don't keep your eyes on them, they have the capacity to harm you in a surprise attack, even though they'd never do it. Ender is the kind of guy who would take offence at this and say he was being accused of being a cheater, and demand that they avert their eyes, despite everyone in the room knowing he's never lost a fight in his entire life and he loves throwing the first punch.**
To close off this week, we leave the forest and return to Miro waking up in bed, with Novinha and other siblings present. Novinha recaps his paralysis and says that the doctor can help him recover a lot, and they manage some yes/no communication through open mouth/closed mouth sounds. Novinha tells him that while things may be very bad for a time, he will get better and it's worth trying, but inside her head she despairs to a degree that manages to start at 'realistic' and skip rapidly over the border to 'ableist rubbish'. Miro's paralysis is worse to her than Olhado losing his eyes, worse than Pipo or Libo or Marcos' deaths. Yeah. Worse grief for the paralysed son (who she says will recover) than her husband or 'true love' dying horribly.
Quim and Olhado quickly work out a communication method, using a computer terminal to let Miro pick out letters one at a time to spell messages. (Their method is unnecessarily slow; they rotate through the entire alphabet one at a time, rather than any kind of organization that would let him skip to later letters without having to go through the first section endlessly. No eye-tracking either. Sure, that might be hard for a teenager to program in the middle of the night, but--it's the year five thousand; did the notion of accessible computer interfaces just not come into fashion in this galaxy?)
Miro asks about the Little Ones and gets a recap on the rebellion and Ender going off into the forest, and arduously spells out a message to be taken to Ender immediately. Novinha squeezes Miro's hand again (he lightly squeezes back, which is only one of many, many ways that he distinguishes himself from being a corpse oh my god Novinha you used to be cool) and leaves, scrambling over the fence after Quim with difficulty. She remarks, half-amused, that they'll have to install a new gate next to their house, and I'm wondering:
Gobawa's a caricature of the pragmatically-heartless politician, so he says "When it comes to war, human is human and alien is alien. All that ramen business goes up in smoke when we're talking about survival." The Little Ones are, of course, the first real opportunity anyone's had to put Valentine's terminology into practical use, so I guess one point for realism that no one really cares about it; the weird thing continues to be that people are even talking about the Hierarchy of Exclusion while simultaneously taking so little interest in the Little Ones themselves for decades.
Back in the forest, Human leads them through the trees and leaps around drumming on trunks, and there's more dialogue-that-doesn't-actually-communicate-anything about the third life, which has something to do with Pipo and Libo's murders. To be clear, last chapter they explained that Miro wouldn't 'sprout' if planted, and a couple of chapters before that the Little Ones were given reason to believe that Pipo and Libo had really not wanted to be eviscerated, and still when Ender asks "What is the third life?" he gets a non-answer ("The gift that Pipo kept for himself") that assumes he knows exactly what Mandachuva means ('that thing where we murder you and you turn into a tree') but somehow hasn't caught onto what it's called.
Ouanda is still boggling at the way Ender asks direct questions, because utterly transforming the Little Ones' civilisation with foreign technology is one thing but asking them to define terms (after teaching them two entire human languages and the meanings thereof) is outrageous. Ela, who currently bears all of my hopes for real science, is wandering among the trees and actually noticing that there are as few plant species as there are animals--one tree, one vine, one kind of undergrowth.
They arrive at a clearing with a single massive tree that they think at first is crawling with worms, but they are corrected: it's the three hundred twenty "little brothers". (At this point, my confusion of last episode has to be considered resolved, I guess--all 320 new births in the last four years are still in larval form, which means Arrow and Cups are from a previous generation, but they only received their names within the last couple of years.)
And now it's time for the kind of sexism which is practically unavoidable when you deal with societies that have incredibly strict gender roles compounded with actual physical dimorphism, and yet still manages to find new heights of gratuity through the kind of lofty analysis of cross-gender interaction usually associated with TV shows with laugh-tracks.
A wife appears, much bigger than any male they've seen--females don't reveal their names to males, but Human confides that they call her Shouter amongst themselves. She speaks the Wives' Language so beautifully that it sounds like singing, so obviously this can't be a pile of sexist rubbish. She agrees to meet with Ender, and to let Ela and Ouanda come with him (being ladies and thus approved), and to allow him any translator he wants as long as it's Human.
Ender sees more female Little Ones watching him from the various houses as he approaches, and asks how many there are, but only when Shouter--fuck it, her name is Star-looker; we won't find that out for a few more chapters but I'm not using a stupid nickname just because Card thinks he's clever. Star-looker says that among the wives, the males do not speak unless spoken to, and Ender just nods, pivots, and marches away. Human protests, but Ender states that he will deal as equals or not at all, and it may be an honor to be among the wives but it's also an honor to have a Speaker for the Dead in their presence as well. So. Yeah. Ender, whom careful readers will recall is axiomatically right about everything moral, sees no value in respecting the cultures of other species; he rejects their value system and substitutes his own, which is how we know that he's enlightened.
Human says that he can't relay Ender's words, and Ouanda contributes by realising that he means it's literally impossible to say 'this male demands not to be commanded by females' in Wives' Language, so Ender asks that they conduct their discussions in Males' Language.
Kind of funny that Ender's approach, which he describes as egalitarian, involves everyone doing everything he says and zero concessions on his part. (This is like a case study of why people who identify as 'equalist' instead of 'feminist' or 'anti-racist' are not to be trusted.) There's much cacophony among the wives and Ouanda critiques his anthropological practice (the only rule he hasn't broken so far is 'don't kill anyone', ha ha inside-joke foreshadowing spoilers he's going to kill someone later and it'll be the Right Thing to do), but Ender says he's there as an ambassador and thus anthropological rules don't apply. Tragically, he seems unaware of any diplomatic rules to replace them. Ender thinks it'll all work out:
"Because I came out of the sky. Because I'm the Speaker for the Dead."
"Don't start thinking you're a great white god," said Ouanda. "It usually doesn't work out very well."Here we see more proof that being aware of your clichés will not protect you from playing them perfectly straight and godawful. Jane pops up with more impossible information, because she's started working out Wives' Language and she describes it as "more archaic--closer to the roots, more old forms", despite not having any information on what Males' Language sounded like past thirty years ago. Information comes from nowhere in this universe and it's amazing. (Also, in Wives', female-to-male speech is automatically imperative and male-to female speech is automatically supplicative, and 'brothers' sounds a lot like 'worms'.)
At bloody last, Ender is invited to come back, "as a sister to a brother", and Star-looker speaks in Males' Language in the holy birthing place, which Arrow declares makes this a "very great day", because apparently he has also personally ditched the idea that he will not speak unless spoken to by a wife. Star-look is still half a metre shorter than Ender, which I'm a little sad about, because I was enjoying imagining her massive, like an eight-foot-tall bear. There's more back and forth, which is mostly about how awesome Ender is, asking Human to speak as directly as possible and put the blame on him, the "rude framling", and asking not to be described as 'holy'.
There's a bunch of drawn out exposition and "I can't say that in any language" and so I will sum up: they learn that Little One mothers don't grow to adulthood, but give birth while still quite small and their bodies are eaten by their newborns. The mothertree cracks open so they can see the even-tinier Little Ones inside (in the meantime, Jane works out that the trees 'speak' by reshaping their wood to modulate the echoes of existing soundwaves, which is why the Father Tongue involves drumming on trunks with sticks). The wives were sterile or never fertilised (which involves carrying them from the mothertree out to crawl around and pick up pollen from the father trees in the forest, like Rooter, which is the real reason the males have their nipply bits--they're for young mothers to cling to during the journey).
Ouanda and Ela immediately begin wondering what could be done to allow the mothers to survive (caesarean sections and the introduction of high-protein foods to the inside of the mothertree) but of course Ender shuts them down--"How dare you!"--saying that in a few centuries if the Little Ones want to do that for themselves they can (I guess points for non-colonialist principles, but revoked for insisting it can only happen in the distant future), and then this hurricane of wrong:
"...We can't begin to guess what it would do to them if suddenly as many females as males came to maturity. To do what? They can't bear more children, can they? They can't compete with the males to become fathers, can they? What are they for?"
This, of course, is the natural conclusion of Card's genetic-continuity fetish: if you can't/don't/won't have kids, you're literally useless and dangerous and we might as well mulch you into baby formula. He says this, out loud, in the middle of the Wives' village, populated by the most revered of the Little Ones, the leaders of their society: women who didn't give birth. The cognitive dissonance is amazing, the offence is spectacular (lucky for him Human isn't doing a live translation or the wives would have just have all heard him say that he thinks they're pointless), and come to think of it, it raises a big question which the book will never address: do the wives grow into trees when they die? If so, it's a bit biologically weird that they aren't able to fertilise mothers themselves in that form; here in the real world, most trees have both 'male' and 'female' components and I'm pretty sure no trees have completely non-fertile forms, so why did the trees of Lusitanian spontaneously develop infertile forms just because they merged with a strictly dimorphic animal? The kind of Salvador-Dali-inspired evolution that had to lead to plant-animal-life-stage-hybrids was obviously focused on maintaining reproduction above all else, but either the wives' trees have no genetic contribution or the male Little Ones are the only ones who actually merged with the trees and the females are still meat-creatures from start to finish. (I mean, in a better book, there would be actual parallels drawn to the COTMOCs and the ability of infertile people to tremendously contribute to society, the idea that people have value apart from being a link to future generations, but Ender's just completely shut that whole line of thought down.)
...Ouanda was still upset. She had made the raman transition: She thought of the piggies as us instead of them. She accepted the strange behaviour that she knew about, even the murder of her father, as within the acceptable range of alienness. This meant she was actually more tolerant and accepting of the piggies than Ela could possibly be, yet it also made her more vulnerable to the discovery of cruel, bestial behaviours among her friends.This is just arbitrary. She's so accepting and tolerant that she can cope with them brutally murdering her father, but that makes her more vulnerable to finding out that they have violent reproductive cycles? Why is one 'acceptably alien' and one isn't? Ender (Card) is just stringing words together however best fits his pet framework. Ouanda's own dissonance could be explained in a variety of ways (she has precedent for Libo's death, she's had years to convince herself that her work is not all for naught because these are civilised people whose laws they just need to understand and now she's faced with information that drives home how dissimilar they really are and revives the spectre of possibility that her father died for no meaningful reason) but nope, it's all about how she's super-tolerant of aliens and therefore aliens being weird hurts her even more. The Xenocide has spoken.
It turns out that Human did translate a little of this exchange, but he made sure to keep his propaganda as pro-Ender as possible: he said that Ouanda wanted to make the Little Ones be more like humans and Ender said this could never happen or he'd have to put the fence back up.
If anyone's keeping score at home:
- Introducing new technology that allows them to birth and feed hundreds of new males per generation, completely changes their diet, equips them to hunt, and enables them to prepare for global conquest: the good and right sharing of technology among equals, well done, fifty points to Gryffindor.
- Introducing methods that could allow a few dozen females per generation to grow to adulthood and partake in society instead of being devoured in childbirth: disgusting imperialism, you are wrong and rejected, go to skeleton hell jail.
They begin negotiations with a traditional threat from Star-looker, demanding everything humans have to offer or she'll send the males to murder the colony in their sleep. Human explains that this is traditional Little One boilerplate for negotiations, but Ender demands that she withdraw the threat or he'll give her nothing. (Remember, respect the Little Ones and the ways they do things different from you, except when you find it personally offensive.) Star-looker gets up, rants to the heavens a bit about how rude Ender is, then sits down again:
"She says she'll never kill any human or let any of the brothers or wives kill any of you. She says for you to remember that you're twice as tall as any of us and you know everything and we know nothing. Now has she humiliated herself enough that you'll talk to her?" [....]
"Yes," said Ender. "Now we can begin."Now, that's meant to be ironic, fine, but this is exactly the 'egalitarian' problem summed up. Ender demands that he be spoken to as an equal, but Star-looker is intensely aware that they are not equals. Humans have better science, more resources, longer recorded history, starflight, hundreds of other worlds, and ships literally on their way to Lusitania right now with death rays that could convert the entire planet to undifferentiated minerals in the space of a couple of seconds. Trying to pretend that they are 'equals' is completely erasing the context of the situation. Ender can and has and continues to absolutely dictate the terms of everything that happens, and he's also the one deciding what 'equal' means. This is a pantomime that satisfies his notions of fair play despite the fact that he's the visiting team and also all of the referees. Star-looker opens up with the way she speaks to her equals, the wives of other forests, and Ender tells her no, this is insulting, so she sarcastically (but accurately) humiliates herself and he's good to go.
I've studied a half-dozen kinds of martial arts, most of which had some form of sparring. When you spar, you bow to your opponent, and you keep your eyes on them. Not because you don't trust them, but because it symbolises your respect, your acknowledgement that if you don't keep your eyes on them, they have the capacity to harm you in a surprise attack, even though they'd never do it. Ender is the kind of guy who would take offence at this and say he was being accused of being a cheater, and demand that they avert their eyes, despite everyone in the room knowing he's never lost a fight in his entire life and he loves throwing the first punch.**
To close off this week, we leave the forest and return to Miro waking up in bed, with Novinha and other siblings present. Novinha recaps his paralysis and says that the doctor can help him recover a lot, and they manage some yes/no communication through open mouth/closed mouth sounds. Novinha tells him that while things may be very bad for a time, he will get better and it's worth trying, but inside her head she despairs to a degree that manages to start at 'realistic' and skip rapidly over the border to 'ableist rubbish'. Miro's paralysis is worse to her than Olhado losing his eyes, worse than Pipo or Libo or Marcos' deaths. Yeah. Worse grief for the paralysed son (who she says will recover) than her husband or 'true love' dying horribly.
Quim and Olhado quickly work out a communication method, using a computer terminal to let Miro pick out letters one at a time to spell messages. (Their method is unnecessarily slow; they rotate through the entire alphabet one at a time, rather than any kind of organization that would let him skip to later letters without having to go through the first section endlessly. No eye-tracking either. Sure, that might be hard for a teenager to program in the middle of the night, but--it's the year five thousand; did the notion of accessible computer interfaces just not come into fashion in this galaxy?)
Miro asks about the Little Ones and gets a recap on the rebellion and Ender going off into the forest, and arduously spells out a message to be taken to Ender immediately. Novinha squeezes Miro's hand again (he lightly squeezes back, which is only one of many, many ways that he distinguishes himself from being a corpse oh my god Novinha you used to be cool) and leaves, scrambling over the fence after Quim with difficulty. She remarks, half-amused, that they'll have to install a new gate next to their house, and I'm wondering:
- Why they wouldn't just tear the entire fence down for its various valuable resources
- If she and Quim, who have never been in the forest before, really think that carrying a vital message into alien woods in the middle of the night without a map is the best way to avoid further catastrophes
- Why she climbs the fence right there when Ender and company left the village by a completely different direction
Speaker for the Dead: forcing us to ask the hard questions, like 'what the hell' and 'why would you ever' and 'hang on but you just said oh never mind I give up'.
Next week: Ender forces the primitive savages to give up war, and literally sympathises with an imperial colonialist murderer. Aren't you so glad I'm back?
---
*Although I'm curious now what happens if you Park shift while on a planet instead of floating in the vacuum of space. Do you get shredded by the atmosphere, or is it a warp field that would take a chunk of your immediate environment with you into space? If it's not a Star Wars scenario where planetary gravity fields inherently kill warp flight, wouldn't Park-shifted ballistic weapons be a super-cheap way to bombard a planet? Unlike typical Star Trek warp drives or Star Wars hyperspace, all indications are that near-luminal ships in Card's galaxy really are travelling at relativistic speeds in normal space. These are questions that I want answered much more than 'how earnestly does Ender feel guilty about the terrible things he's done?'
**Utterly random tangent: at some point in my teenage years, I had a dream in which I reread Ender's Game and there was a short section I had somehow missed in all my previous reads in which Ender and Dragon Army actually lost one of their matches. It had various minor implications for the storyline that I don't remember now; they only part that stuck in my head was that he was defeated by Rainbow Army. Make of that absolutely everything that you like.
**Utterly random tangent: at some point in my teenage years, I had a dream in which I reread Ender's Game and there was a short section I had somehow missed in all my previous reads in which Ender and Dragon Army actually lost one of their matches. It had various minor implications for the storyline that I don't remember now; they only part that stuck in my head was that he was defeated by Rainbow Army. Make of that absolutely everything that you like.
